I love YouTube. I use it for inspiration or to kill an idle hour (which I normally don’t have). I love the variety of user-generated content: different styles, topics and perspectives. I love it that YouTube is huge.

YouTube Advanced Search Operators

I don’t think the search operators I am listing here are anywhere to be found in YouTube’s documentation. All that is listed on the official “Advanced YouTube search” page is the set of the usual search options you see below the search field:

You can filter results by:

Type of results, such as Videos, Channels, or Playlists

Subject category

Video length

Video quality

Features, such as Closed captions, Partner videos, or Rentals

However, as we have seen above, filtering and sorting seldom triggers relevant results.

To bypass this issue, you need to use advanced operators which were inherited from Google search and are really very helpful:

1. Use quotes to force the exact match

This operator may come particularly in handy when you are sure which exact key phrases you want to be included into the search results, for example, the name of a movie or a music clip.

2. Use plus (+) sign to force a word in the results

If one of your words gets dropped out from search results, this operator may save a lot of your time. Similarly, you can use the minus (-) sign to force YouTube search to exclude any irrelevant but persistent words from the search results.

3. Force any word to appear in the video title with help of INTITLE: operator

This trick turns out to be very useful if you, for example, keep getting irrelevant results (video pages that only mention your search term in comments or loosely in description).

Any more YouTube search tricks to force relevant results even when using sorting options?

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Mike

January 28, 2018 at 6:56 pm

Quoting simply does not work. It does something different (not sure what) as these are the numbers of "results" from two different searches (I'm using square brackets to show what I entered in the box - they were not part of my search strings):

You'd think from that that it had actually searched properly, but no - sorting by View Count brings the same old non-matching videos to the top of the list, basically it seems anything with "king" in the title. Looks like the same old arrogant, patronising, insulting assumption by Google that they actually know better than me what I want to find.

The quotes and "+" operators don't work consistently. I was just searching and the search query in brackets [ epic war td arcade "chapter 4 " ] does return mostly results containing the string "chapter 1" or "chapter 2" but hardly any with "chapter 4". adding a "+" operator like [ epic war td arcade +"chapter 4 " ] doesn't seem to change anything. Doing things like [ foo +chapter +4 ] doesn't work either. What's up with that? Youtube is so terrible for searching.

For example, it has no capability to distinguish bettween music set to still pictures from music live performance videos from music videos, which is not that hard, and something I wager many, many users would want. They have about the most advanced copyright detection I've ever seen so if they can do that this is a cakewalk. But they never, ever improve the product instead favoring implementing new (and buggy) features. Ugh. Rant over.

the search querry that you're using seems to be wrong, the operators stop reading the moment you add a space, in example you can see where the error lies on what you posted:
(i replaced the spaces with "_" to show you) in this case you're only forcing [+"chapter], if you want to force all "chapter 4", my best guess would be doing something like this:
[ epic_war_td_arcade_+chapter_+4 ]
[ epic war td arcade +chapter +4 ] (using spaces again)
or [ epic war td arcade "chapter 4" ]

so the operators work like this:
+Word (space to end operand)
-Word (space to end operand)
"Word Word" (starts and ends between the ")
intitle:Word (space to end operand)

in respect to your second part youtube has never looked intelligently inside the videos, if you create a video with the sound of a tv show and the video from another you'll get copyright strike for the sound not the video, now if you use a unedited video of a tv show with no sound you will probably get a strike but not because of the entire video, youtube has a library with pictures of unedited copyrighted shows and it will compare those to still images from the video and if it matches it will send your video link to the company owner and they will review and send the strike, in this case is not automated, thats why mirrored tv shows or scale down and speed up sound are not striked by youtube but by users that stop by and flag them.
So asking for youtube to distinguish between still pictures and actual video and stating that it's "not that hard" it's far from reality, just last year a prototype AI started to distinguish photos and categorize them after years of development and still makes a lot of errors and that is just pictures, forget about watching videos and categorizing them, that's just not here yet.

I need to find comments, not video titles. This method doesn't let me actually drill down to /any/ comment on /any/ video that has a specific phrase. For example, if I want to find any comment for /any/ video that includes the exact phrase "soupy sales." I only get the phrase in video titles, if any.

Hi, can you please help me. This is only lately that it's been happening. I already tried all the above steps that you have provided but none of those had help me. It's just showing the same result. I was actually looking for Japanese romantic tv series ZETTAI KARESHI Special episode. I've already experimented with the words and even attempted to use name of actors but it's just showing few super irrelevant tv series. Please help me.

in the last three years, i noticed that google is not the same.
the quality of results is not near what it was,

i remember a time that the 5th page of google was the beginning of geeks area!
now, you may reach the 20th, and still wondering did i spell it right?
another problem… commercials!

still appreciate google position abut ads,
but, when i search for something, at least 1/2 the page result are from some chinese commercial sites.
regardless of filters or signs i used.
either google allowed them, or they beat the system, whatever
, i think the problem is in google itself,
anyway.. who are wee to blame them ?
in the end we had our happy times together? and just like everything els, it was too good to continue.
thank you.